[Mailman-Users] One-click unsubscribe?

[Ryan Hagan]

Greetings,

First of all, thanks to everyone who helped me solve my last problem, you 
were a big help and I finally got Mailman up and running smoothly.

Now, I'm setting up a list for the press.  We send out monthly press 
releases, but believe it or not, there are organizations out there that 
don't necessarily want to get our releases every month (yeah, surprised me 
too).  So, what I want to do is to provide a way for these organizations to 
"unsubscribe" from the list with the single click of the mouse.  Okay, two 
clicks would be fine too.

Now, I don't REALLY want them to unsubscribe, what I want to do is set the 
"nomail" option to "on" for their email address.  The reason for this is 
that sometimes, somehow, an organization that chooses to unsubscribe may be 
added back to the list at a later date...it happens, trust me.  They'd be 
mighty ticked off if two months after they unsubscribed they were back 
on.  I know, because I've gotten unhappy, less than flattering emails from 
organizations where this has happened in the past.  I'd like to avoid such 
unpleasantness in the future.

My first attempt nearly worked, but not quite.  I set this link in the 
press release:
<a href="mailto:news-request at pacificommultimedia.com?subject=set nomail on 
<pass>?body=--">unsubscribe</a>

This works fine for Eurdra users, but not Outlook users because that email 
client doesn't recognize the "body" tag.  The subject looks like this:
set nomail on <pass>?body=--

This works (insofar as the nomail option was properly set), but returns an 
error to the user's email and I'm afraid that they may not realize that 
they've actually been removed and complain loudly. =(

If I don't have the "?body=--" in there, and the user has a signature, once 
again they get errors from mailman (even though the operation was successful).

So, does anyone know a good way to provide this "one click" removal from a 
list?  I'm not too concerned about HOW to do it, just so long as it gets 
done.  If I need to create a web page/perl script, that's fine.  Thanks a ton!


Ryan Hagan
Pacificom Multimedia
ryan at pacificommultimedia.com